The Janata Dal-United (JD-U) is contesting only the Uttar Pradesh election, but its leadership has failed to include Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Union Steel Minister RCP Singh on the party's list of star campaigners.
Nitish Kumar and RCP Singh were left off the list of campaigners released by the opposition JD-U on Friday. The decision was taken to avoid a clash between the chief minister and the prime minister during the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh.
In his speech at the Muzaffarpur Parivartan rally on July 25, 2015 Prime Minister Modi said: Minister Nitish Kumar appears to have a problem in his DNA because politics does not work like this.
Nitish Kumar at that time replied to the PM by saying: "I am a Bihari, and my DNA is very similar to that of people from Bihar.".
Nitish Kumar has been projected as PM material by the JD-U over the past few months, and the signal of the party's top leadership announcing it would contest the UP elections alone strengthened that claim.It appears that the party has surrendered before the BJP because Nitish Kumar and RCP Singh were not included in the list of campaigners.
The JD-U has listed 15 leaders as the star campaigners of the party for Uttar Pradesh. They are JD-U national president Rajiv Ranjan Singh alias Lalan Singh, Upendra Kushwaha, president of the JD-U parliamentary board, KC Tyagi, national general secretary, Umesh Kushwaha, state president of Bihar, MP Ramnath Thakur, Maulana Gulam Rasool Balyawi, Harshwardhan Singh, Ravindra Prasad Singh, Anup Singh Patel, RP Chaudhary, Surendra Tyagi, Sanjay Kumar, Bharat Patel, Sanjay Dhangar and Dr KK Tirpathi.